During a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) spoke about President Trump's mass pardons for January 6th insurrectionists.
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00:00Gentleman yields, chair recognizes the gentleman from Tennessee, Mr. Cohen.
00:03Thank you, Mr. Chair.
00:05Mr. Fox, I'm just curious, I was listening to your testimony,
00:10and that Sacco and Vanzetti, or whoever they were, Moore and Mitchell, or?
00:14Moore and Mansell.
00:15Yeah, we have Moore and Mansell.
00:18What should have been the crime for cutting that NOAA apparatus apart?
00:25Yeah, so going back to the point Congressman Kiley just made is,
00:28I don't think it should be a crime.
00:29I think this is a thing.
00:30Shouldn't it be a crime to cut something that you've got nothing to do with,
00:35it's not your area of jurisdiction, and to cut it and destroy it?
00:38Well, if they intended to do that, yes, but because they didn't,
00:41I think this is sort of a civil issue where the, I forget the person's name,
00:45but the person who had the research project should, you know, take them to court,
00:49and they should pay for the loss of the property that was damaged,
00:53but I don't think it's the purview of the government to get involved and prosecute them for it.
00:58And this goes back to the point of why men's right of matters.
01:01If they had gone in there intending to destroy it, yeah, I think that's very different,
01:05and then that probably would be appropriate to charge them and convict them with what happened,
01:10but that's not the case here.
01:12It was a mistake.
01:13They thought they were, you know, saving some wildlife, saving some sharks,
01:16and inevitably it was not poachers.
01:20Just curious.
01:20I looked it up and kind of didn't think it.
01:23I think it probably should be some type of offense to destroy something.
01:26You know, you really have no jurisdiction, and you don't make yourself the police,
01:30and you make a mistake.
01:31They should have taken a deal or something, but regardless of that.
01:34Mr. Tolman, let me ask you a question.
01:36Your name was familiar to me, so I Googled it for a long time,
01:39and I didn't find any Tolmans that I would have known of.
01:42Most of them were scientists and brilliant people like you,
01:45but there was a Tolman Hall at Vanderbilt, and I think that's where it came to the back.
01:48Do you know Tolman Hall?
01:49I do know the family.
01:51I tried to get into Vanderbilt Law School and was not admitted.
01:58It's good school, and I'm sure it doesn't mean anything, but it's good school.
02:02So over-criminalization, a lot of that is federal congresspeople looking for issued a juror
02:11and passing laws that probably should be state laws.
02:14Is that not correct?
02:15I wholeheartedly agree.
02:16Years ago when I was a state senator, there was a group of congresspeople that came down to Nashville
02:20and all talked about carjacking, and they wanted to make it a federal law,
02:24and I suggested that it was more of a state responsibility, and they passed it,
02:29some federal law up here.
02:30And now, I don't know what it was, I read somewhere there's a new carjacking law being proposed,
02:35I think by Senator Blackburn, and it changes the duty.
02:38I mean, the standard, right now you have to have an intent to murder or kill or do great injury
02:43to beat a federal crime, and now they're reducing it to being, I forget what it is.
02:49Do you know what the difference is in this proposed law and the law that exists now?
02:53I have seen that.
02:56I think the current carjacking law is an inappropriate federal law.
03:00It should be the state's, it is their primary role to enforce those laws.
03:06And sadly, the carjacking, and I would also say the Hobbs Act cases,
03:12which is in essence now the robbery of a Kentucky Fried Chicken, for example,
03:16I mean, this is an example of the headline of the day driving the lawmaking
03:21and expanding the federal code.
03:24Well, we'll have to look at that when a bill comes before our committee
03:26to see how we respond to it, because it's sometimes so easy to jump into something,
03:31which is really state law.
03:32Yes.
03:33Mr. Fox, I was listening to your testimony.
03:34You were talking about respect for the law and all these laws, et cetera.
03:38Do you think that the pardoning people that attack policemen just makes people think less of the law?
03:50Yeah, I think it's a case-by-case basis.
03:52I think the federal justice system or even state justice systems really don't work well at all.
03:59So there's obviously problems, but blanket pardoning people who violently attack police
04:04and try to overthrow the government, yeah, that's wildly inappropriate.
04:07Anybody think it was an appropriate thing to do to pardon all those 1,600 people in mass
04:12without going through them case-by-case?
04:15That creates a lot of people thinking it's who you know or what you do, et cetera, et cetera,
04:20and disrespect for the court system,
04:22because it was nothing to do with the prosecutors doing wrong or anything like that.
04:26It was just a class of people that he decided to do.
04:30And then there's been a lot of pardons lately.
04:31I don't know if you've kept up with them,
04:32but lots of folks in the crypto business who have been convicted,
04:38large monetary fines as well as jail time,
04:42and tremendous amount of restitution, and they've been pardoned.
04:46And that's, you know, and it happens.
04:47It used to be that the presidents had some shame,
04:50and even if they gave a pardon to their brother or to somebody that gave them a ton of money,
04:55they waited until the last minute, and they could get out of town.
04:59Now they put it on Truth Social, and they parade it around,
05:03and then they appoint them to be an ambassador somewhere.
05:07I yield back to the balance of my time.
05:08The gentleman yields back.